ceasefire casualty israeli troops fire on citizens in gaza one person is killed and several others injured so can the fragile two day old cease fire between hamas and israel hold i have an update straight ahead. a walk in the. greg. so is. the federal government reached a twenty six billion dollars settlement over the foreclosure crisis the money was supposed to help struggling homeowners but our team finds that's not happening and in fact some people are still being kicked to the curb. for most of us using computers and smartphones is simply a way of life but how safe and secure are they and i will break down the top ten

reasons why you should be concerned about cyber security. well good afternoon it's friday november twenty third four pm in washington d.c. i'm christine for you're watching our. let's begin with an update from the middle east where at this hour a cease fire between israel and hamas continues to hold according to israel jerusalem out of our journalism outlet debka months of much of that ceasefire is owed to a phone call by president obama to israeli prime minister benjamin netanyahu in which president obama promised to send u.s. troops to the sinai peninsula the egyptian territory in north africa surrounded by the suez canal in the west and israel on the east now this follows eight days of violence between gaza and israel that left more than a hundred and sixty palestinians in gaza dead within half of them were civilians including thirty seven children four civilians and two soldiers have also been

killed in israel just a little while ago a spokesman for israel's prime minister spoke to r.t. alex cells keep blamed hamas for the deaths of so many civilians in gaza these real doesn't target civilians and if we heard civilians it's we see failure in it but you have to understand that hamas militants hamas terrorists they hide behind civilians the fire rockets our civilians from schools from hospitals they hide their rockets in hospitals in schools we see that the fire rockets from apartments of buildings so if we do not want civilian soon gaza to be hurt we call upon civilians and we do it before every strike we call upon civilians that they will not be around that there is that they will not let the terrorists to use them to use their houses to use the schools. well the international community is

still watching to see what will happen next the ceasefire was largely brokered by egypt and gyptian officials have said the rough op and slow will remain open both sides have made clear they're ready to strike should the others show signs of breaking the truce you can see more of an interview with alex six pm eastern on breaking the set with abby martin. but shift our focus now to the economy and to a problem that continues to be widespread across this country despite major efforts to overhaul the system the issue that people continue to be forced out of their homes earlier this year a twenty six billion dollars settlement took place that was supposed to hold big banks accountable for the mortgage crisis and help struggling homeowners but a new report shows that is not exactly what's happening especially one of the hardest hit states in this country california artie's wrong go in there shows us why it's happening and also the heartbreak that it's causing for some families something i walk in the. halls for

a year or so. but there are a what modern immigrants weeps when she remembers the memories of her former home in los angeles she and her husband old hundreds of thousands more dollars in loans in the value of their home and were forced to give up their piece of the american dream the bank they. held the twenty six billion dollar national mortgage settlement was supposed to help struggling homeowners and make the financial industry clean up its act we have reached a landmark settlement with the nation's largest banks that will speed relief to the hardest hit homeowners but while banks say they've given billions of dollars to distressed homeowners the money is mostly being used to get people out of their home rather than help them stay this is the house but then you know last year in a short sale she still loved to work in her garden or her grandchildren played out here in the front yard now this house is just another example of how the mortgage crisis continues to force people from their homes banks say they provided

homeowners with twenty six billion dollars in relief since march half of that went to short sales a short sale means the house goes on the market with a profit of the sale going back to the bank to pay out the loan the homeowners kick down and really gets any of the profit from the sale the point of the settlement was we're going to keep people in their homes we're going to help people who are struggling with their payments we're going to keep them in their homes for a short sell the opposite happen financial institutions were already doing short sales before the settlement thanks can actually save money when homes go through a short sale process instead of going to foreclosure bank of america j.p. morgan chase and wells fargo relied most heavily on short sales for chase short sales amounted to two thirds of its relief this is a good deal for the bank first of all because they would make they make more money on a sword sale than they would on you know if the home was foreclosed upon when they had to resell it the new short sale numbers have angered homeowner advocates who feel banks should be doing more to keep people in their home those funds were

supposed have been divvied up to help some of these people who were defrauded get back in weeks. some of what they lost the never regained everything we have delivered to california eighteen billion dollars in relief for california's homeowners however there is no relief for people like better who still battling the bank over fees on her short sale my husband if they have headache and me cry other homeowners are also crying and demanding help. but through the robo signing deal the government way detroit to go after the banks for their just septic practices the banks were able to sort of get away from with this without too much harm to their bottom line without any harm in terms of having to go to jail while homeowners struggle to rebuild their credit and their lives the wrongful deeds of banks remain unpunished in los angeles remember linda archie all right so this

landmark settlement a relief for struggling homeowners family it seems for the vast majority of them that this barely scratches the surface i want to bring in ramona window into this discussion now to talk more about this so ramon according to this report from the office of mortgage settlement overside banks have shelled out more than twenty billion dollars in relief but nearly half of that has gone as you said to debt forgiveness and it has not kept people in their homes that you reference this was this the plan all along or did something in the process sort of go off course here . the purpose of the settlement was to help homeowners avoid foreclosure and to help keep banks accountable so that they wouldn't repeat the practices that led to this mortgage crisis but what we're seeing here in the trends is that that as you mentioned sort of the credit that's being taken from the banks for doling out benefits is really just short sales which ends up putting people out on the street

now the problem with this and it's actually beneficial to the homeowner somewhat because it's not as bad as a foreclosure if you don't take that huge hit on your credit but at the end of day you lose your house and a lot of critics of the settlement and a lot of critics of this report say that it really isn't any sort of punishment to the banks because when it comes to short sales the banks had already picked up their short sales even before the settlement was signed so that there's a lot of fear that what the trends that we're seeing right now aren't really going to help to punish the banks in any sort of way from california certainly one of the hardest hit states when it comes really to the number of people who have lost their homes why is that. there are a variety of reasons you're absolutely right seven out of the ten top foreclosure markets in the entire country are here in the golden state i mean in riverside county one out of seventy three homes is in foreclosure now we're dealing with one

of the biggest and most lucrative real estate markets here first of all so during the housing boom people got rich and it got really really broke once it fell but we can really look to settlement that happened just a few weeks ago with countrywide where there they had to deal out hundreds of millions of dollars after settling a lawsuit in which they were accused of really targeting minority borrowers and this is black and latino families who were unfairly targeted by the subprime mortgage lenders primarily countrywide here in california more than half of the foreclosures were black and latino families and just forty and forty eight percent were let the families alone so that's a big reason why the crisis hit especially hard here in california and according to this report from on three hundred thousand homeowners have benefited from this program overall so far getting an average it says eighty four thousand three

hundred dollars so for those who actually have benefited what's next for them. right christine well this is another number where we have to dig a little bit deeper out of those three hundred thousand it's really just about seventy thousand who really who received first lien modifications or secondly modifications and about thirty thousand other people are really under just a trial modification right now so there are still thousands of people which are in limbo and many other people who fall under that category. of short sales so at the end of the day people who are on these from modifications are still unsure whether they'll get that full market modification and even those people that did get a modification have to deal with the fact that. the foreclosures in many markets are still very high and that's affecting property values throughout california and in many other states that were hit hard by the mortgage crisis sure seems ramon

like there is still a long way to go to be able to keep a whole lot of these people in their homes are to correspondent rym uncle window in los angeles thanks so much you bet well in the coming days there will be some things to keep your eye out for regarding the future of your privacy in this country and the increased ways the government has decided protecting not privacy might no longer be a priority earlier this week we had attorney aimee's to kind of edge on the show she was one of the two lawyers with epic the electronic privacy information center who filed a freedom of information request to make president obama's directive on cyber security public all that boy a request was promptly denied and yet still there are many americans who don't seem to pay much attention attention to what's going on in the world of cyber security are to correspondent was wall has more. well here at r.t. we pay close attention to what's happening on capitol hill regarding cyber security legislation but the effects reach far beyond washington here are ten things in your

daily life that are affected by cyber security first off your personal correspondence our e-mails are saved and can be accessed by the government and the private companies they contract and under current laws phone calls can already be listened to number nine your health the establishment of electronic medical records is a major part of health care reform but those records can be accessed by doctors and other health care providers some of whom aren't your personal doctor and also things up these private records to vulnerabilities from hackers and at number eight your money using online banking apps makes banking information passwords and account numbers easily open to scanning via smartphone and bank servers can store identifying features of the devices used to access the information number seven your vote voting machines have long been called hackable and on election day we saw some regularities stemming from both being allegedly altered as to the fact that

many observers claim the current crop of technology is in need of serious oversight should make many wonder but the possibility of throwing in election might not be too far from reality and number six mass transit transportation systems work thanks to information and transit system networks that control navigation traffic signalling systems traction power systems traveler information and fare collection systems all of which are vulnerable to cyber attacks and number five infrastructure parts of our critical infrastructure from electric grids to water pumps and filtration systems to nuclear plants and cellular all depend on computers to function. a number for government communication governments and corporations use security e-mail or secure e-mail rather systems to stay in contact but with techniques like spearfishing these e-mail service can be breached plus should

whistleblowers like bradley manning face life in solitary confinement for passing along this information. and number three global finance high frequency trading uses computer algorithms and technological tools instead of runners on an exchange floor of course time the global finance system to computers means that it is just another part of our world affected by cyber security and number two news and information news organizations use web content systems to plug in and share their stories and governments large and small connect with constituents via official web sites which can easily be taken down and distributed denial of service attacks they can also be hacked and last but not least the surveillance state big data is here to stay the ability to store and compress huge amounts of information is getting easier databases are already finding patterns giving individuals a digital footprint between security cameras hiding and more and more places and

cell phone location information there won't be many blanks to fill in and the privacy the expectation of privacy we have or at least our parents had will be lost . in washington liz wall arche. well there are other reasons to be concerned about new decisions being made in the name of cyber security while they might be beneficial to the government and private industry they often come at the expense of individuals rights and we have a spew a few specific examples to tell you about to help me do that i'm joined by our web producer andrew blake and i do want to start with the case and you are in homer he was convicted earlier this week. in newark on tuesday of trying to steal more than one hundred twenty thousand users e-mail users who just purchased i pads he was convicted of illegally gaining access to eighty servers charged with conspiracy to access a computer without all the authorization and fraud this case is not very simple

though there's a whole lot of holes that i want to fill in for and there's a whole lot of holes that someone really needs to fill in because it seems like the justice department kind of screwed up when they were figuring out how to do this it goes back to two thousand and ten when you aren't home or in a group called security they discovered that there was pretty much just a huge security flaw with eight hundred two servers and the serial numbers belong to all new i pads were linked to profiles that were posted openly on the internet not password protected not encrypted if you knew where to look you could find them and instead of calling up eighteen thousand telling him you know telling a.t.t. this is what's up our home or went to the press and revealed ok look there's a huge security breach and thousands of thousands of customers can easily be targeted because of this but he didn't break into any security and you know he didn't cite he didn't do anything he just sort of exposed what he found and what he thought a lot of other people could find it to simplify it's more or less finding finding himself in the right place at the wrong time he discovered on the internet that you

can access all this information without having any sort of special credentials or history much just going into an address bar and typing a website it's a simple as that and finding something that's just sitting there on the internet now a lot of stuff. it's put on the internet that people might not certainly want to defy you might have a compromising pictures or or old high school poetry or something they don't want to end up on there but that's why you have to protect things in the case of eighteen t. they took thousands thousands of their customers and left their data sitting there on encrypted waiting for some of the time to come along and say hi there's a problem here now you never have anything he was just smart enough to find out what was going on but because these laws are quite defined yet when they took them to a court in new jersey last week and they tried to charge him for this the jury only took around an hour to convict him on a couple of charges and now he's looking at prison so his attorney does plan on appealing but shows us that you can pretty much do anything and if a prosecutor tells the court one thing and convince the other way that no one is

really safe right now i think you make a really really good point when it comes to laws and the internet there are a whole lot of things that just aren't defined they don't refer to the the legal you know the case that took place a few years ago to try to solve this one talk a little bit about the precedent that this case could set for years to incredibly incredibly damaging one actually if if this case is an appeal properly and it stays as it is right now means that anyone who has anything on the internet ever on any sort of accessible network can take someone else to court just for finding it if if you don't take your own for cautions to ensure things are pretty protected securely they are open there for everyone that's why people don't give out passwords but with a ninety nothing was password protected it was just sitting there waiting for it and you aren't who made a really good point when he was on trial he said that you know any computer in this instance is a protected computer the internet itself is a publishing platform and you don't have to call up google every time you want to

use google you just go onto google and you type something so hopefully i mean for the sake of saving ourselves who use computers daily this this will be reanalyzed in another court read. hopefully the present that was set this week in newark will not stand the absolutely i do want to talk about someone else now jeremy hamad he's been behind bars for nearly a month he's accused of being a member of. and part of the group that hacked into that private intelligence firm strat for a whole lot going on here he was denied bail. talk a little bit about some of the other things we're learning about this case ok let me say you important thing yeah it's really you know have been himself was it was in court in new york this week and there was no conviction there was like you said he's still it's been eight months and there hasn't been a trial yet he's is hopefully going to be released on house arrest so that he can kind of you know get himself together before he goes into court for this and the judge went and said no you can't get bail because you're a dangerous person if we let you out you're going to sneak out of your apartment

you're going to go to a coffee shop you're going to go onto a computer in you're going to steal credit card numbers again and you are pretty much a domestic terrorist so they had to stop him and say look sorry not only can you get belt but we're also thinking about putting you in prison for life and one really interesting thing here was that hammond he did he could be the very first american citizen charged with a crime relating to wiki leaks because we know that when those files provide him to julian assange and then from there are things going to steam rolled so it's really interesting case here because not only are we seeing that you know alleged computer criminals can be put away for a really long time but the government can easily be using this case to set an example for anyone else who dare do something that the government might not like on a protected network well the other thing too that i think you didn't mention is that the judge in this case is related to someone who actually was a client of stratfor yes yes yes i think. it's kind of funny actually had that the

judge who was presiding over this case in a new york district court her husband was one of the couple thousand clients of stratfor who subscribe to the email updates you pay some like twenty five dollars a month and you can get intelligence from. this so-called global intelligence company sent to your inbox well the judge's husband was one of the few thousand people whose identities were compromised in this attack sept strafford already filed they already came to a settlement with a class action lawsuit and we believe now that to the judge's husband actually received that settlement because he was impacted by the heck so there's calls now from members of anonymous and members of the jeremy hammond solidarity network to try to bring this up into the media is something we're doing right now so that you know we realize oh maybe a judge someone with personal interest in the case perhaps be sitting on the bench the judge is telling a twenty eight year old guy high by the way you can't be released on bail and then we could put you away for a while and didn't you tell me earlier andrew that this judge actually said he was

as dangerous as a sexual predator oh yeah because he can use programs like tor the onion router which allows people to cover up their footprints when they do things online a lot of people use tor so that they can protect their identity when they're talking to sources or perhaps you know sharing information online in his case they believe that he used it when he was helping out tax transferred and distributing those files among members of well sucks but because sexual predators can also use tor he's just as dangerous as them and so now he's going to be denied bail just last question and i mean bigger picture you know we sort of started off this statement talking about why this wasn't necessarily a great week for attack. and not so much for type of but for people who use technology for example who have made it a part of their lives and for privacy rights i mean is there light at the end of the tunnel where we can hope that what really we've been seeing for the last couple of months or so many efforts on a congressional level to try to pass cyber security legislation and we already know that congress is having a hell of a hard time on their part trying to do that so ideally we can we can rely on the

court system to take her these little discrepancies where looks like we really can't right now but hopefully these cases are getting the media attention slowly but surely that are necessary so that people will start voicing their opposition like remember what hap. so. even the m.d.a. when there is these things that started to seem like like fringe topics to begin with but when people realized oh ok so put that passes i can't do this on the internet so when they started getting in touch with their lawmakers who decided oh wait maybe i shouldn't vote for this piece of legislation hammond may have actually committed a crime that's on the books life imprisonment for victimised victimless crime seems a bit harsher with our time or for all intents and purposes i think a lot of people go ahead and say that he never actually committed a crime all right certainly very interesting stuff here are two weapons use or injured like thanks as always or thank you. well here in the united states today is considered to be the busiest shopping day of the year there are ads and specials and mobs of people and committed to shopping until they drop about how is it that

a holiday season supposed to be about caring and sharing kicks off in such a way that is centered around spending and consuming laurie harford as with the resident on that spoke to several people in new york city for more on that. the holidays has arrived in the united states but instead of talking about family and religion americans seem only to be talking about shopping why is that this week let's talk about that do you think that americans are aware of the irony of having a crazy frenzied shopping day the day after we give thanks for what we already have best day of the year which one thanksgiving or black friday the day after black friday exactly you love it yeah it's a great time of year to go shopping and trample people. the world's ending anyway twenty. calendar. so we don't have to worry about fixing our consumerism we don't have to worry about shopping nothing do you think it's an american thing or do you

think it's a worldwide thing. i think are probably worse than do you think americans are a little too obsessed with shopping for the holidays no i think it's great it's wonderful fun it's great to get out but it's spending money on stuff you don't necessarily need that's how the holidays are about what's makes the economy go round is that the most important thing you know we're hearing from the scrooge are people obsessed with shopping where you're from well yes because we know the whole reason why we come here so we can show so we are obsessed and we can't wait for tomorrow what does it say about us as a society as humanity that we're so obsessed with consumerism. i think it's very pretty sad why do you think americans are so crazy about shopping during the holidays. media you guys. i did tell everyone to buy specs actually and so they do i haven't seen one commercial for jesus i haven't seen one commercial for volunteers i haven't seen one commercial about the spirit

at all but i've seen plenty of shopping why is that. the material aspect of society there they push it and we fall into that. those that are fought for falling into the trap it's a combined effort. humanistic. with an economy in the tank a climate shift and a world at war it might behoove us off to focus less on consuming and more on what's really important this holiday season. well capital account is up next on our to us check in with lauren lyster to see what's on the agenda i tell you what lauren it was really interesting being out for black friday this morning it wasn't nearly as crowded as it usually is something going on in this economy. you know tell me i mean that is a really interesting anecdote it'll be interesting to see how black friday does

shake out compared to prior years but there's plenty of reason to worry about the u.s. economy and sounds like you saw it just one earlier this morning though you could argue hey maybe not such a bad thing if consumers are getting more indebted to buy the latest greatest whatever gadget but while black friday takes over the consumer consciousness in the u.s. headlines like this that or maybe morrow koran it may eclipse the eurozone crisis however we will give you plenty of reasons why you should not take your eyes off this crisis in just a few minutes maybe the worst is now behind us and you'll find out why soon enough you're such a tease i guess that's enough reason for everyone to stay tuned and keep watching for us here on the news side though that's going to do it for now. but for more on the stories we covered go to you tube dot com slash r t america a whole lot of stories that we did today and also didn't have time to get to you on our website our team dot com slash usa and you can of course follow me on twitter

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car maintenance free risk free studio child free. downloads free broadcast quality video for your media projects and free media. culture is that so much i'm going to use music to share the current financial crisis and the market fragile ceasefire hands over gaza after eight days of destruction and and what did israel actually achieve what about the palestinians.